“I guess when you’re young, people expect you to accept things more easily,” I said. “And you’re a guy. Guys don’t have soft feelings.”
He snorted. “My parents got me this book on dealing with death: Male in Mourning. It said that sometimes you need to drop out, to just deny. That denial can be good for men. So I tried to take an hour and pretend like I didn’t care. And for a little bit, I really didn’t. I sat in my room at Meredith’s and I thought about…bullshit. I just stared out the window at this little square of blue sky and kept saying, It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay. Like I was a kid again. And when I was done, I knew for sure nothing would ever be okay again. Even if they caught who did it, it wouldn’t be okay. I don’t know why everyone keeps saying we’ll feel better once someone’s arrested. Now it looks like the someone who’s going to be arrested is me.” He laughed in a grunt and shook his head. “It’s just fucking insane.” And then, abruptly: “You want another drink? Will you have another drink with me?”
He was smashed, swaying heavily, but I would never steer a fellow sufferer from the relief of a blackout. Sometimes that’s the most logical route. I’ve always believed clear-eyed sobriety was for the harder hearted. I had a shot at the bar to catch up, then came back with two bourbons. Mine a double.
“It’s like they picked the two girls in Wind Gap who had minds of their own and killed them off,” John said. He took a sip of bourbon. “Do you think your sister and my sister would have been friends?”
In that imaginary place where they were both alive, where Marian had never aged.
“No,” I said, and laughed suddenly. He laughed, too.
“So your dead sister is too good for my dead sister?” he blurted. We both laughed again, and then quickly soured and turned back to our drinks. I was already feeling dazed.
“I didn’t kill Natalie,” he whispered.
“I know.”
He picked up my hand, wrapped it around his.
“Her fingernails were painted. When they found her. Someone painted her fingernails,” he mumbled.
“Maybe she did.”
“Natalie hated that kind of thing. Barely even allowed a brush through her hair.”
Silence for several minutes. Carole King had given way to Carly Simon. Feminine folksy voices in a bar for slaughterers.
“You’re so beautiful,” John said.
“So are you.”
John fumbled with his keys in the parking lot, handed them to me easily when I told him he was too drunk to drive. Not that I was much better. I steered him blurrily back to Meredith’s house, but he just shook his head when we got close, asked if I’d drive him to the motel outside town lines. Same one I’d stayed at on my way down here, a little refuge where one could prepare for Wind Gap and its weight.
We drove with the windows down, warm night air blowing in, pasting John’s T-shirt to his chest, my long sleeves flapping in the wind. Aside from his thick head of hair, he was so utterly bare. Even his arms sprouted only a light down. He seemed almost naked, in need of cover.
I paid for the room, No. 9, because John had no credit cards, and opened the door for him, sat him on the bed, got him a glass of lukewarm water in a plastic cup. He just looked at his feet and refused to take it.
“John, you need to drink some water.”
He drained the cup in a gulp and let it roll off the side of the bed. Grabbed my hand. I tried to pull away—more instinct than anything—but he squeezed harder.
“I saw this the other day, too,” he said, his finger tracing part of the d in wretched, just tucked under my left shirtsleeve. He reached his other hand up and stroked my face. “Can I look?”
“No.” I tried again to pull away.
“Let me see, Camille.” He held on.
“No, John. No one sees.”
“I do.”
He rolled my sleeve up, squinted his eyes. Trying to understand the lines in my skin. I don’t know why I let him. He had a searching, sweet look on his face. I was weak from the day. And I was so damned tired of hiding. More than a decade devoted to concealment, never an interaction—a friend, a source, the checkout girl at the supermarket—in which I wasn’t distracted anticipating which scar was going to reveal itself. Let John look. Please let him look. I didn’t need to hide from someone courting oblivion as ardently as I was.
He rolled up the other sleeve, and there sat my exposed arms, so naked they made me breathless.
“No one’s seen this?”
I shook my head.
“How long have you done this, Camille?”
“A long time.”